Submerged
by annaisadinosaur
Summary: It is in the bottom of a car entirely submerged in water that George finally understands.


**Submerged**

. . .

They had just finished a special on the air about a convicted three-time murderer in the States who was to be put to death, and George found himself wondering if life was really all that valuable, in the end.

He was still as the red light flickered out, and listened as the radio cracked and fizzed like his mum was frying chips on the stove back home. The dull sound of movement resounded about him as people slowly rose to break the silence in the cramped corner of a room, but for a few moments he was lost in that place he often disappeared to, that blankness between dreaming and waking, except that he hadn't dreamed properly in days.

It wasn't that he was defending the murderer, or could even fathom an ounce of understanding for him, but he wondered if those Americans really understood what they were doing. Three lives gone, and all they were doing was trading death for more death. Sort of like war, but even more pointless.

His eyes were so dry that he wanted to just keep them closed a while, but eventually he turned from the dead light, slowly coming to. "Well," he said, and abruptly got to his feet, "be seeing you, then."

He gathered his things, few though they were, and strode towards the door in such a manner that no one ever bothered trying to stop him. Paul and Bryon both nodded or waved their usual salutes, but Emma just stared with her lips pressed together in contemplation. She didn't say goodbye straight away; she always saw to it that she was the exception (and complication) to his departures. _Always_.

He nearly—he didn't, but he _nearly_—paused with his hand on the door for her to call out, "George, wait one second!" But he didn't wait, and she shuffled furiously after him, cheeks flushed a shy pink when he'd turned around.

"Yeah, Em?" It felt too rehearsed at this point, but he supposed it wouldn't feel like that for much longer.

"Won't you come out with us tonight?"

Briefly he consulted the sky as if he didn't already have his answer. "It's late," he informed her.

"Of course it is," she said, visibly flustered, "that's not the point. The point is that you never come. You should."

"Should I?"

"Yeah. You could go, I dunno, we could…"

"Emma," he exhaled, because he knew quite plainly what she meant. "I should get going."

She shrunk a little. "Okay. Yeah." She bit her lip in, nodding, "Yeah, it's fine."

"I'm sorry, really. I just..."

"I get it, George." She cracked a weak smile. "You're that mysterious guy no one ever gets to know, as much as they might like to. I respect that. We've all got our boundaries. This is yours."

"Yeah. Suppose so." He didn't know if he liked the sound of that.

"You're going home tomorrow then, I heard? Back to England?"

"Mm-hm," he said, and drew out the syllables so he might sound more enthused about it than he really was.

"Will you be gone long?"

"Not entirely," he replied, and then decidedly added, "Listen, Emma, take care of yourself. Don't let those blokes give you a hard time, all right?"

She smiled again, lightly, almost sad. "Sure. I just..."

"What?"

"I just wish your goodbyes were happier. That's all."

"Oh," he said.

"Okay." She tucked a strand of hair behind her hair and ducked her head briefly, before she tightened her lips and said, "I'll see you around then, George."

He gave the door a little push and the smell of rain swept inside. Everyone—even Emma, who prided herself on being the exception—knew that when that door was open, George was gone. But then again, if anyone'd ever taken the time to look at him, they might have known he never really _was_ there at all. Always just in a state of gone.

"Bye, Emma," he said, and the wind was in his ears as he stepped into the night.

She waited at the door as he sunk further and further into the dimness, and he rubbed deep against his eyes, lighting colors beneath his eyelids. There was some awful combination to that exit that made his chest feel heavier than it had before. Maybe it was due partly to the fact that she was wrong; she wouldn't see him around anymore. That was the last time they'd ever see each other, in fact. He'd given in his notice weeks ago without telling anyone.

It wasn't that he wanted to stay, because he didn't. It was just that he felt guilty for leaving, like he was running away from something significant. And he _was_ running away, but not from Emma. Just sort of the idea of her, what she stood for.

Because life was valuable. Maybe not at first, when all the faces blurred together and passed by in streams of endless color, but afterwards, always afterwards, when it was twelve o'clock and he couldn't sleep because there was a new face in his mind, one with expression and history and life.

And that was bad, because life was precious and beautiful, but never as precious and beautiful as when it was lost. George had lost a lot. That's why he ran and skipped from one place to the next, hoping he could turn the page without meeting anyone in the eye.

So he supposed that he didn't really want to stay at all. He just knew that he, for however brief of a time, had been that to Emma. A face in her mind that she couldn't escape from, a shadow she would never be able to place.

She'd never know that this stop along his life was not a permanent or even meaningful one to him. He just wandered in in the exact manner he was now wandering out.

The city was quiet as he made his last few steps within its boundaries, with the lights on the wet ground in broken reflections beating a metronome through the heavy air. The lights were his favorite thing in this city, especially after work when he walked alone. They flashed and clicked even now, even when there was no one on the streets, even when everything else had ended.

This was just who he was now, he thought, with the rain in his lungs as he breathed it in, with a nice girl still waiting for him to change his mind. He was the man that walked alone at the end of the world.

The Edinburgh sky caved sometime later, brushing his face with rain that felt more like wind. He got to the edge of the city where life re-blossomed, cars humming and roaring over the glistening roads, blind to the time of day, always just going and going somewhere distant and gone.

It was sometime later, when he was walking along the low bridge that crossed to the outermost skirts of the city, that he heard the noise. As long as forever lasted he would think of it as _the_ noise, as he never really knew what it was that alerted his attention, only that one moment he was walking and thinking about life and death, and the next he wasn't thinking anything at all. He saw it all happening slower than reality, the spinning of the car on a road that'd been rained on all day long, the precise motion in which it broke off the side and dove like a swan into the river.

For a long while—or what felt like eternity to him—he just watched. Cars around him skidded to stops, horrified witnesses scrambling out of their cars and standing immobilized as the car began to sink, because acknowledging that someone had just driven off the bridge was all they could really do. They were all singularly powerless to the lives that they were losing, lives they didn't even know, going and going and gone.

And then he started running. His thoughts returned to him as his feet beat against the pavement, and his breaths alternated rapidly in a metronome not completely unfamiliar to him. He heard their cries of alarm, but he didn't stop running; he only wondered if the water was too far down, or if it was cold, or if he even knew how to swim as well as he liked to think he could. But he got to the edge and he jumped before he could think on it any longer.

When he hit the water, he was vaguely aware of the hurt panging through his body. And it was cold, _so_ cold. It was autumn, though; of _course_ it was cold. Needles stabbed every inch of his skin but he pushed through it, aching to a throb, lungs feeling like they might bleed. The car was still at the surface and he rose to it, gasping for breath as he broke through again.

"Hey!" he called out, the water in his eyes making him half blind, "hey! Are you okay? I'm going to get you out!"

There was coughing and gasping, and George saw that all the front windows had been broken out. A voice was struggling to make itself heard: "I can't do the—the seat—seatbelt—my—my wife—she's not—"

George suddenly remembered his wand and reached for it, "Hold on, I'll—" but fell beneath again, his lungs filling with the scathing tide.

"H-h-hurry—I'm up to my eyes, almost!—She's not—"

George fought against the water, choking and kicking, thinking to himself he'd had plenty of fights in his lifetime, and this was _definitely_ not one he was going to lose. With a surge of movement he gripped his wand and blasted the windshield into nonexistence with a burst of violent color, and before he could reorient himself, he held his breath and dove again, blasting apart their seatbelts and pulling the two out together.

In reality, it hadn't gone quite as smoothly as that, but that was the easy effort he replayed again and again in his mind as he watched the two escape to the surface. And it was the only thing on his mind when his wand fell from his fingers and began to sink out of sight.

Swearing and cursing an incoherence of murmurs, he ignored the ache in his body and dove after it to the bottom of the car. His limbs were growing useless and heavy and the water in his lungs was making him blind with the war raging inside his chest. After countless moments of struggle, he'd lost sight of the wand and his entire motive and suddenly was, at the bottom of the car, completely sure that he was going to die.

It occurred to him, then, that if death could not be traded for death, it could be traded for life. And he thought of the man pulling his wife back to safety, the man and woman whose names he didn't even know and probably would never know, and he thought, in the midst of the sparkling blue and blinking lights, that Fred would say this was okay. He wasn't giving up.

So George, suddenly thinking of Mum and Dad and Ron and Ginny and Angelina and everyone but most particularly Fred, just let go.

When he opened his eyes again, the light was brighter than anything he'd ever seen.

. . .

**A/N**: Written for the Quidditch Fanfiction League Competition for round 5 with the prompts George Weasley, shadow, radio and "I'm up to my eyes!" This was my obviously failed attempt at trying to write about George without all the Fred angst, but I failed because I sort of just implied it the whole way through and yeah.. well. It was a fun write, except I didn't do my homework and now I'll probably fail and never go to college or have a job because of it. SO REVIEW SO I CAN FEED MY FUTURE CHILDREN!

Just kidding. I won't _fail_... I just probably won't get any sleep tonight.

Who cares GO CANNONS


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